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The course will focus on American abstract painting from the 1930s to the 1960s, emphasizing the works of art at the Anderson Collection at Stanford. We will focus on looking closely at pictures by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other renowned abstract painters, developing skills of speaking and writing about these works of art. We will also place these pictures in their mid-20th century context: World War II and the Cold War; Hollywood and popular culture generally; Beat literature; and locations such as New York and San Francisco.

This course concentrates on many important American photographers, from the era of daguerreotypes to near the end of the pre-digital era. We study photographs of the Civil War, western exploration, artistic subjects, urban and rural poverty, skyscrapers, crime, fashion, national parks, and social protest, among other topics. Among the photographers we study: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Emphasis on developing students' abilities to discuss and write about photography; to see it.

Last offered: Spring 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 178:Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (ARTHIST 178, ARTHIST 378)

The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.

AMSTUD 183:Re- Imagining American Borders (CSRE 183, FEMGEN 183)

In this third volatile and violent year of the Trump presidency, American borders of all kinds seem to be dangerously tight. This is seen in the literal horror of immigrant detention centers filled with hungry, sick children taken from parents, ongoing mass incarceration and police attacks on young black and brown men and gendered violence targeting trans Americans and pro-choice movements. Additionally urban and rural antagonisms and constant social media anger with a kind of newly brutal linguistic framing are all underscoring a vision of an America of intractable difference. The hopeful transformation from the 2018 elections, which is having enormous reverberations in the present 2020 presidential campaigns, is interestingly also based in a discourse of difference. This course investigates sources of these borderlines and most crucially how novelists, filmmakers, poets, visual artists and essayists perceive racial, ethnic, gender, religious, sexual orientation and class borders in t
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In this third volatile and violent year of the Trump presidency, American borders of all kinds seem to be dangerously tight. This is seen in the literal horror of immigrant detention centers filled with hungry, sick children taken from parents, ongoing mass incarceration and police attacks on young black and brown men and gendered violence targeting trans Americans and pro-choice movements. Additionally urban and rural antagonisms and constant social media anger with a kind of newly brutal linguistic framing are all underscoring a vision of an America of intractable difference. The hopeful transformation from the 2018 elections, which is having enormous reverberations in the present 2020 presidential campaigns, is interestingly also based in a discourse of difference. This course investigates sources of these borderlines and most crucially how novelists, filmmakers, poets, visual artists and essayists perceive racial, ethnic, gender, religious, sexual orientation and class borders in this country as they may re-imagine difference possibly via Vijay Prashad's polyculturalism or Gloria Anzaldùa's borderlands. Texts include those of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Boots Riley, Dee Rees, Ryan Coogler, Nelly Rosario, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Layli Long Soldier, Naomi Shihab Nye, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie, Shailja Patel, Kara Walker, and the podcast Ear Hustle, narratives created and produced from inside San Quentin, along with Shane Bauer's undercover expose of an American prison. Course guests will include actors and writers from the acclaimed web series, The North Pole, showing parts of the new second season of biting, humorous stories of gentrification, racism and immigration issues in West Oakland. And the Bay Area founder of the only women-run, inclusive mosque in the US, Rabi¿a Keeble, will speak with us about an American Islam with a Muslim community that embraces difference. Course work includes active discussion, journal entries, one comparative analytical essay and a creative final project/with analytical paper examining personal or community identities.

AMSTUD 186B:American Song in the 20th Century and after (MUSIC 186B, MUSIC 286B)

Critical and creative exploration of song in the Americas. About twenty-five key examples will guide discussion of the interactions between words, music, performance and culture. Weekly listening, reading and assignments will be organized around central themes: love, sex and romance; war and politics; labor and money; place; identity; society and everyday life. Genres include art song; blues, gospel, jazz and country; pop, soul, rock and hip-hop; bossa nova, nueva canción and salsa; electronic and experimental. Takehome and in-class assignments will include critical and creative writing, and music composition, production and performance; final projects may emphasize any of the above.

What does it mean, and what has it meant historically, to be "Asian American" in the United States? This lecture course explores this question through the example of artists, craftspeople, and laborers of Asian descent. We will consider their work alongside the art, visual culture, and literature of the United States. Key themes will include the history of immigration law; questions of home and belonging; art, activism, and community; interethnic solidarity; and gender and queerness. Artists and authors will include Isamu Noguchi, Grace Lee Boggs, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Grace Lee Boggs, Zarina, Carlos Villa, Takashi Murakami, Anne Cheng, Lisa Lowe, among many others. In addition to learning the history of Asian Americans and reading key texts in Asian American studies, this course will also teach the foundational skills of close looking and primary source research.

In an age when some 50% of museum visitors only "visit" museums online and when digital technologies have broken open archival access, anyone can be a curator, a critic, an historian, an archivist. In this context, how do museums create experiences that teach visitors about who they are and about the world around them? What are the politics of representation that shape learning in these environments? Using an experimental instructional approach, students will reconsider and redefine what it means to curate experience. (This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units to satisfy a Ways requirement.)

Last offered: Winter 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

AMSTUD 240Y:The Yiddish Story (JEWISHST 240)

The Yiddish language is associated with jokes, folktales, and miracle legends, as well as modern stories. This class traces the development of Yiddish literature through these short oral and written forms, following Jewish writers out of the East European market town to cities in the Soviet Union, Israel, and especially the United States. We conclude with stories written in other languages about Yiddish writers. Readings include Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Esther Singer-Kreitman, Cynthia Ozick, and Dina Rubina. Readings in English; optional discussion section for students who read Yiddish.

The Hollywood director Howard Hawks was taken up by European film critics in the 1950s as an early case study for auteurism, in which Hollywood directors were regarded as a film's primary author. While Hawks' work ranges across decades (1920s-70s), studios, and genres (comedy, western, war, musical, epic, adventure), his work is recognizable both stylistically and narratively. His collaborations with writers and performers, the impact of his minimalist style, and issues of heterosexual romance and homosocial groups will be emphasized.

ANTHRO 1:Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (ANTHRO 201)

This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.